For most PC users, it’s not a huge deal. Plus, user-upgradeable RAM isn’t completely dead.
Intel’s upcoming Lunar Lake platform won’t support user-upgradeable or swappable RAM at all. That means you better be sure to get all the RAM you need on your Lunar Lake laptop, because you can’t get more memory without buying a new laptop.
It’s a big change for the Intel x86 platform, which has traditionally offered this kind of flexibility. After all, we’re talking about PC laptops and not “mobile devices” running Android or iOS… right?
But, while the news is shocking on its face, it’s not as bad as it sounds. This RAM change will actually help the average PC buyer, and it won’t be a long-term threat to people who want upgradeable RAM. Here’s why.
Lots of laptops already have soldered RAM, anyway
What Intel is doing here isn’t new. Many laptops—probably even most laptops in 2024—ship with RAM that’s soldered to the motherboard.
In other words, rather than putting RAM sockets on the motherboard and inserting RAM into them, manufacturers permanently attach RAM directly to the motherboard. You can’t remove it.
The advantages are clear. For example, low-power DDR5 (LPDDR5X) offers improved energy efficiency and longer battery life, but it must be soldered to the motherboard as close to the CPU as possible.
Soldered RAM also needs less space than a SO-DIMM stick, which is important when everyone’s trying to make laptops as thin as possible. With less space taken up by RAM, this also can help the laptop’s thermals, boosting cooling performance.
Intel’s standardization of onboard RAM with Lunar Lake doesn’t change the situation for a lot of laptops, which already wouldn’t let you upgrade or swap their RAM.
Most people aren’t upgrading or swapping laptop RAM
Most PC users aren’t cracking open their laptops to upgrade RAM. I’ve certainly done it—and if you’re reading this, you’ve probably done it as well—but it isn’t something most people do.
Sure, you can often save money by getting a laptop with upgradeable RAM and upgrading it yourself. If you buy a gaming laptop with less RAM than you need, you can often pop it open and upgrade the RAM for less than the difference of getting a higher-end configuration. That’s especially true if you can find a low-RAM configuration on a huge sale.
Of course, it’s only true for laptops that offer user-upgradeable RAM—and that isn’t a given in 2024, even for gaming laptops. But business laptops still tend to prioritize configurability, letting a workplace’s IT department crack them open to upgrade RAM when a worker needs more.
All that said, the average home user is never going to do anything like this with their laptop’s RAM. Those of us who appreciate and take advantage of upgradeable laptops are in the minority.
Lunar Lake’s approach boosts battery life
It’s not like Intel simply decided to stop you from upgrading your laptop RAM for the heck of it. Rather, Intel decided to include the RAM in the chip package itself, moving it closer to the CPU.
As PCWorld’s Mark Hachman put it in his deep dive on Intel’s Lunar Lake architecture:
“When you buy a laptop, a PC maker will install memory. Sometimes soldered on, sometimes with slots that allow more memory to be added in the future. Now, Lunar Lake puts that memory within the chip package itself.”
This tighter integration between RAM and the rest of the chip package—CPU, GPU, and NPU, for example—results in faster speed and efficient power consumption. According to Intel, this move will make the RAM use up to 40 percent less power.
Future hardware options will offer upgradeable RAM
Lunar Lake’s approach to RAM isn’t the end of the story. If Intel were permanently axing user-upgradeable RAM for all time, I’d be arguing against it—and we could all get our pitchforks out together! But that’s not what’s happening here.
Intel’s Lunar Lake platform is focused on power-efficient laptops with long battery life to counter the threat of Arm-based processors like the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. It’s not meant to be a permanent change to the x86 PC hardware platform.
In fact, Intel’s future hardware will offer upgradeable RAM. Jim Johnson, Senior Vice President at Intel, explicitly said about user-upgradeable RAM: “We will offer those options in the future.” He also said that the “next turn of the roadmaps will offer more traditional options.”
Intel
Yes, you will have to go out of your way for a laptop that offers user-serviceable RAM in the future. But, again, that’s already true in a world where so many laptops have soldered RAM, anyway.
What if you want more than 32GB of RAM?
In the meantime, one problem looms: Lunar Lake configurations top out at 32GB of RAM. For now, your only choice is between 16GB of RAM or 32GB of RAM in your laptop. That’s rough if you need more.
But if you can be patient, you’ll find a wider variety of hardware configurations (with more RAM) available in time.
Between future chip packages with more memory and future Intel platforms that’ll offer user-upgradeable RAM, the future looks fine for upgradeable RAM.
While Intel’s Lunar Lake is designed to produce laptops that are focused on power efficiency, future platforms—like Arrow Lake and Panther Lake—will each have their own different focuses.
CAMM2 may be the best of both worlds
Ideally, we’d have the best of both worlds: user-upgradeable RAM that was small, fast, and power-efficient.
Until then, there’s good news in a new standard called CAMM2, which offers much smaller and more power-efficient modules than the SO-DIMM RAM that’s typically used for user-upgradeable RAM on laptops.
In the future, laptops with user-upgradeable RAM may use this standard (or something very similar), thus offering the best of both worlds.
If nothing else, it’s good to see that the PC industry hasn’t forgotten user-upgradeable RAM entirely. It’ll be an important part of the future of laptops, so it’s okay that Intel’s Lunar Lake is what it is for now.
